Chapter 28: The Dog

The cat was a bit cheerier when it returned, but they still walked in silence for the next stretch, past the beginnings of a vast nothingness to Violet’s left where the town and buildings suddenly weren’t. Ahead of her, at the beginning of the next block, the metal arch of an old traffic signal stood, enveloped by flowering yellow jessamine vines and pale strands of morning glory. Red and white roses intermingled with the rest, wisteria falling from the arm of the signal in soft, purple veils, nearly touching the ground.

As they drew closer, Violet realized that she could see points where the thorns disappeared from rose vines and, strangely, different species of flowers began to bud together. Swirling curls of rose petals were interrupted by smooth wisteria blossoms and the slender trumpet shapes of jessamine flowers vomited forth thin morning glory vines, each species of flower flowing seamlessly into one another.

“There it is again.” Violet said.

The cat trotted over to investigate, stroking one paw along the swell of a yellow jessamine bloom, stirring the tiny cone of immature rose petals that had grown within. The whole effect was uncomfortably similar to a goblet filled with blood.

“I see what you mean, these colors don’t go together at all.” The cat said, then laughed when Violet rolled her eyes. Unsheathing its claws, it gently snipped the hybrid flower free and zipped it over to Violet, placing the specimen at her feet.

Violet knelt to examine her companion’s find. Again came a strange, dissonant sense of normalcy. The flower (flowers?) felt ordinary beneath her fingers, a few slow black ants crawling from the rose’s center, bodies dusted with golden crumbs of pollen. They waved their antennae vaguely in her direction, then went to resume their chores, disappearing between the delicate folds of the rose’s silken petals.

Folding back one side of the jessamine blossom, Violet found its base, a place where rose red melted seamlessly into saffron yellow, both flowers one and the same. Letting the bloom fall back into place, Violet furrowed her brow.

“This doesn’t make any sense.” She said.

“Of course not,” the cat agreed. “I don’t think it’s meant to.”

Violet didn’t ask what that was supposed to mean. The flowers were strange and, like the cat had said earlier, probably representative of a greater creeping malignancy, but it wasn’t at all clear what she was supposed to do about it…if there was anything she could do in the first place.

Past the traffic signal the path was framed by a burnt out brick building on her left and a lower, smaller construction off to the right. There was a faded red cross above the front doors, which had long since fallen in, and Violet vaguely recognized it as a medical symbol. She had to be looking at a hospital.

Opposite the hospital, the charred remnants of the building there seemed somehow to fall in scale even as Violet approached. All that remained of the front facade was a brick archway, the back wall jagged and dark with soot. The rest had long since dissolved into rubble.

The cat, a few steps ahead of her, suddenly stopped dead, ears perked, staring through the archway. Violet came to a halt just behind her companion, following its gaze.

Past the archway, at the edge of the shadows that pooled against the broken back wall, Violet saw something move. It was a dog, standing with its head down and tail shivering behind it like a freshly struck lightning rod. Thin streamers of saliva hung from its jaws and Violet could see that the animal had bared its teeth, though not at anything in particular. There was a sound baking off of it, a groan keying inevitably upwards into a snarl. The dog shook its head and coughed, an ugly hacking sound that made its entire body jolt as though it had been struck.

The dog looked sick, its coat patchy and dull, bald spots dotted along its flanks where it looked to have bitten itself. The curves of its ribs were clearly visible, like barrel hoops beneath gray skin and lank, unhealthy fur. Slowly, it raised its head just a little and though Violet thought that surely it was looking at her, the dog’s gaze focused upon a patch of ground just in front of its paws and it shuddered forward a few inches, into the sunlight.

Again the jolt came, and the coughing. Now that she could see it more clearly, Violet realized that the animal before her was uncommonly large and, despite its emaciation, solidly built. It would have been able to look her in the eyes without much trouble had they been standing face to face.

Slowly, the cat glanced back at her. Its ears were pinned and Violet could see the fur along its tail beginning to rise.

The dog took another hesitant step into the sun, then shook its head, more violently this time. The groan ratcheted up into something close to a whine, then pitched back down. Its head was fully in the light now and, as it huffed and wheezed, recovering from whatever terrible ordeal it was enduring, Violet realized something. The dog was missing an eye. Just as the fox had been.

The cat took a careful step back, moving to Violet’s side. Moving as gingerly as she could, Violet imitated her companion, but there must have been something different about her gait, for the dog’s head snapped up and very suddenly it was staring directly at her, ears raising unevenly, jaws jittering open.

Its hind legs stumbled in place, but though it seemed to be trying its hardest to backpedal there was a terrible force undercutting those motions, forcing the dog forward. It staggered and hissed as it hit the sunlight more fully, but the brightness seemed to be no real obstacle now. It had seen her.

“Run.” The cat said, voice bizarrely calm, then turned and was doing just that.

Violet needed no prompting, a great pulse of terror squeezing the bottom of her stomach as she wheeled around to follow the cat. They raced across the street, Violet clutching her notebook tight to her chest. For a half second she thought about turning to show her sigil to the dog, but the thought of what might happen if that didn’t work was so terrible that she abandoned the impulse immediately.

The cat aimed for the hospital and leapt over the splintery remains of the front doors, Violet right on its heels. She could hear the dog whipping through the grass behind her, its breath jagged, a vowelless, hungry noise leaking out alongside every exhalation. Violet plowed through piles of crumbling mineral fiber and nearly caught her feet on a half ruined chair. The hospital was impenetrably dark after the brightness of the day and panic surged up to meet her as she staggered forward.

Behind her, the dog hit the doorframe with a bang and a shrieking yelp that made Violet’s stomach clench. Now that it was closer she could feel something, a horribly familiar crackle that wasn’t quite words yet. It seethed at the boundaries of the dog’s form, screaming with desperate eagerness for what was to come.

Then the cat was alongside her and Violet felt the urgent stroke of its tail along her knees, urging her to the dim form of a hallway where the roof had partially fallen in, daylight pouring through the holes. There were doors lined along the right side of the hallway and the cat skidded to a halt next to the first one that had an intact door.

“In in in!” It yowled and Violet grabbed for the handle. The door itself felt frighteningly flimsy, made of thin aluminum, but it opened easily and she turned as she entered, tugging the door shut as the dog and its demonic host closed in. Then the door closed with a hollow bang and Violet fell back, nearly stunning herself against the alarmingly close presence of…a wall.

She tripped over the cat, which had done much the same thing, and for a moment the two of them fumbled in place, trying to account for the very real presence of barriers that should not have been there.

Violet blinked, eyes still baffled by the darkness, and then yelped as the dog slammed into the door with the whole of its body weight, the demon hissing like a tea kettle, its noise lancing into the center of her mind.

The cat twined anxiously around Violet’s ankles, pale sparks of static shooting between her pant legs and its fur.

“A closet,” it said uncomprehendingly. “Of all the doors….” It leapt helplessly in place, a sharp yip of frightened laughter setting Violet’s teeth on edge. To see the cat shocked, scared even….

She rode out a hard shiver of fear, then pressed herself against the back wall of the closet as the dog rammed the door again, its breath coming in jagged, unpleasantly liquid huffs. This time the door groaned, a shriek of tortured metal making the hair on the back of Violet’s neck stand up. The crack of pale light at the bottom of the door had suddenly grown slightly wider.

Setting her rucksack aside, Violet dug for her lantern and wound it into brightness, throwing hard edged shadows across the tiny space she’d accidentally trapped herself in. There were the remains of old shelves to either side of her, and broken cleaning equipment here and there. Cracked plastic jugs with faded labels sat crookedly upon shelves piled with dust an inch high. Cobwebs festooned the higher corners and spiders crouched uncertainly upon them, discomforted by the sudden noise and light.

For a moment there was silence but for the demon and the coarse, ugly sound of the dog’s breathing, right at the bottom of the door, then it was drawing back for another lunge.

Desperately, Violet patted along the walls around her, but they were sturdy, the rotting drywall backed by solid concrete. The cat shook its head and began to say something, only to be interrupted by a heavy impact that made them both jump. Outside, from where it seemed to be leaning almost intimately against the door, the dog spoke.

“l e t m e i n w o n t h u r t y o u p r o m i s e e e e .”

The words were wrong, not just in pronunciation but tonally off in a way that made Violet want to brush herself clean. It was like what had happened with the wolf, only this time the dog was living and Violet could hear it struggling to breathe against the demon’s manipulations

And all the while it spoke Violet could hear the dog pressing against the door, searching for weak points. The metal groaned, its noise hollow and resonant within the confined space. There was a reek of blood on the other side of the door that made Violet want to gag.

Behind the words the demon’s noise still endured, but somehow it seemed to be holding itself back, as though she could somehow be coaxed into giving herself up

“Crack the door.” The cat said suddenly. “Next time it draws away, crack the door and let me out. I’ll draw it away.”

Violet stared. It took a moment for the cat’s request to even begin making sense.

“No!” She cried, shaking her head.

“Violet….” The cat said, voice dropping nearly to a hiss, as though she were being childishly obstinate.

“That won’t work, it wants me.” She said, then flinched against the back wall as the door bounced in place once more, the dog resuming its barrage. It had picked a spot now, aiming for the bottommost corner, opposite the hinges. And it was working, the crack of light there had turned into something close to a triangle, the metal slowly beginning to bend inwards.

The cat fixed her with a hard stare, eyes flashing in the lantern light, then looked to the gap in the door and began to tense. Realizing what it was about to do, Violet knelt and hurriedly scooped the cat into her arms. It jolted and squirmed, caught completely off guard, and Violet squeezed her eyes shut, knowing that what she was doing wouldn’t make a bit of difference. At any moment her arms would be empty, the cat slipping past the air and away. But instead, slowly, her companion relaxed.

“Are you sure?” It asked.

Violet nodded, still hugging the cat tightly to her chest. It shifted its legs into a more comfortable position, tail twitching against her knee, then sighed. Again the dog slammed itself against the door, the hole at the corner filling with a snarling, panting whirl of teeth. She wasn’t sure, but it sounded like the hinges on the door had begun to loosen. The cat drew itself straight and looked into Violet’s eyes, painfully serious.

“If you do this then it’ll all be up to you. I won’t be able to help. Do you understand?” It asked.

“Yes.” Violet said, her voice barely a whisper. Her heart was working so fast she felt faint, a numb sense of bizarre wishfulness hanging over the world, as though what were happening couldn’t possibly be real, the consequences of failure too terrible to be properly imagined.

The dog hit the door again, but this time it lingered, claws scrabbling over peeling linoleum, jaws huge and blunt, filled with entire worlds of sharp, snapping teeth. It had worked almost its entire head into the gap now and Violet caught a hint of one madly rolling eye before the dog shivered back with a hoarse, huffing snarl that sounded just as desperate as it was angry.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“p l e a s e h e l p h e l p m a k e i t s t o p s t o p s t o —” The discordancy shrieked, but it was different this time, and strangled itself before the words could even be finished. Violet heard the dog stagger against the opposite wall of the hallway and then make a sharp, short sound that was almost a scream.

“c o m e o u t”

  It hit the door with a bang.

    “p l e a s e”

      The gap widened.

        “h e l p m e”

          The stench of blood was enough to make her dizzy.

The horrified numbness within her had expanded and it seemed to take entire eons for the situation to be summed up. There was the dog on the other side of the door, and then the dark and the closet and the walls she was trapped against. Eventually the dog would get through, that much was an inevitability. Either the hinges would give way or the gap at the bottom of the door would grow too wide. She could put her sigil up, she could wind her lantern to full brightness and stand firm but none of that would matter. The dog would come through, and it would open its jaws to reveal those endless teeth, and then it would rip her to pieces and she would die screaming.

It was all up to her, just like the cat had said. Violet suddenly felt immensely small and alone, the closet constricting to become as morbidly intimate as the walls of a tomb.

But though the terror was pressed as close as anything, though it squeezed her heart and endeavored to paralyzed her soul, Violet knew that she had felt such dread before. She had been frightened while facing the drainpipe demon, and also while crossing the river. There had been horror unparalleled during her encounter with the monster, yet she had survived that too. To succumb here…it couldn’t happen. This couldn’t be the end of her.

Violet fetched her hatchet. The handle was rough and splintery beneath her fingers and she gripped it tight. To raise it felt uncertain, like she ought to be chopping wood yet wasn’t. A sick, ugly feeling welled from the bottom of her stomach, like hot water against a burn, clashing utterly with a sudden wild, shrieking urge to bring the blade down the next time the dog’s head appeared; to kill kill kill!

It had always been with her, this urge, buried beneath everything else like a pool of magma encased in basalt. But now it was exposed and riding high atop a hot spew of terror, and to realize this made Violet feel paralyzed all over again. Yet through the frozenness she knew with a dreadful certainty that when the dog was exposed enough she would split its head and then rip apart whatever came staggering forth from the spray, and she would do so with her eyes wide and her teeth bared like some feral beast, no matter the depths of the horror that filled her at the mere thought—

The dog crashed against the door like a hammer and then was scrabbling forward, slobbering the depths of its horror and rage and yearning at her, blood streaked head pushing into view and Violet could see the door’s metal beginning to crease and knew that the next push would be the last, the dog would get in and then it would kill her.

She raised the hatchet high with trembling hands, like an executioner with her blade and could already feel the rising scream of survival gathering within her, a great annihilating pulse that would sweep aside all else.

Suddenly the dog was very still, and so was the demon. Violet found herself shocked into inaction by the ringing impact of total silence. Then the dog’s one eye widened and its jaws flew open like it was about to offer some shocked exclamation. In an instant it was gone, yanked backwards and out of sight.

Violet heard it hit the opposite wall with a bang and then the demon was shrieking, the crackle of its noise piercing her mind like a spray of buckshot, wrath and terror intermingled, nearly one and the same.

She looked to the cat, as if this could somehow be its doing, but her companion’s fur was still bristled and it stared back, eyes huge and bright with unhidden confusion.

Violet went for the door.

“Wait!” The cat hissed, but it was already too late. Violet pushed the closet door open with one shoulder and had to stumble forward as it sagged out into the hallway, two of its three hinges giving way completely.

She stared down the hallway and was faced with a great shapeless impression, a billowy mass of white plasticky fabric and the lifeless grin of a horse’s skull. The beast she had encountered on the first night of her journey was hunched low, the dog held in a formless embrace as it snapped and writhed and struggled. It was stronger than the beast, or at least more able to shift its weight, but the beast seemed unperturbed.

The struggle poured back and forth across the width of the hallway, claws and teeth baffled by cloth. The beast rolled as though taking the form of an ocean wave and thrashed the dog hard against one wall, splintering wooden siding, a cascade of dust from the ceiling lighting the clash in a pearly haze. All the while the skull stood still as though removed, swathed in fabric yet taking no direct part. Its jaws were tightly shut in the impression of a tight lipped smile, like a person trying their hardest to be polite in the face of some troublesome but unfortunately public chore.

All the while it pinned the dog more and more thoroughly to the floor, forcing it splay legged. There was no attempt to fight back now, the dog had been beaten and what noises the demon was making sounded to Violet more like a klaxon than a voice, bursts of mindless horror with no impression of sapience behind them.

Slowly, carefully, the beast leaned down, as much as a shapeless creature could, and seized the dog’s muzzle, skull leaning close as if to frame the dog’s. Then it pulled back and to the side and Violet heard a shearing crunch. The dog’s noise dropped to a low, declining wheeze.

But it wasn’t dead, nor did the beast let go. It moved carefully, enveloping the dog near totally in a shroud of fabric before shuffling it carefully away, off into the darkness of a doorless room. Violet could not tell what the beast did to finish off the dog, only that the noise of the occupying demon came to a sudden halt, almost in mid syllable.

The beast drifted back into view after a moment more, filling the hallway ahead of them. Moving slowly but deliberately, the cat stepped protectively in front of Violet, and though its breathing was light and it seemed to be trying to act casual, Violet could see that her companion’s fur was still bristled.

For a moment the beast lingered, as though ensuring that she’d come to no harm, then, unhurriedly, it turned and began to drift away.

Violet blinked, caught off guard, and glanced quickly down at the cat, who seemed to be heaving a sigh of relief. She stepped around her companion, one hand raised.

“Wait!” She cried.

The cat skittered in place as though its tail had been caught alight.

“Violet!” It protested, but she ignored it.

The beast turned to face her once more, skull slightly cocked. It said nothing.

“I…” Violet stammered, suddenly bashful and intimidated in equal measures. “Thank you for helping us.”

The beast stared silently for what felt like a small eternity, the inky pits of its eye sockets unreadable, then it looked into the dark room where it had killed the dog and nodded, as though it had only just put together the context of her words.

Violet felt the cat bump against her knee, the motion rough and full of displeasure.

“That thing just killed a demon.” Her companion hissed, but though she felt a cold shiver of unease, Violet held her ground.

The beast gave the cat a cursory glance, then moved forward, bobbing slightly as it went. It took Violet a moment to realize that the beast was trying to imitate the gait of a person, something with legs. It stopped in the midst of a pale beam of sunlight falling through the half collapsed roof and made a little noise that wasn’t quite a sigh. Caught in the full brightness of daylight Violet could suddenly see little pits and imperfections in the beast’s skull, places where its teeth were chipped and splintered, the old remains of what looked to be swirls of decorative paint arcing along white bone. Smears of blood shone all across the front of its fabric, or what Violet assumed was the front, but she did her best not to look at those.

“…Do you have a name?” Violet asked after a moment, unsure what else there was to say. “I’m Violet.”

At this the beast looked away, though whether it was confused or bashful Violet couldn’t tell.

g i r l ---- It said. ---- V i o l e t . . . s a f e

The beast nodded again, satisfied with what it had accomplished, then slid smoothly up one wall and through the hole in the roof it had stopped under. Its movements were silken and so quiet that it took a moment for Violet to even register that the beast had left. She hurried forward to see if it might be up on the roof, perhaps looking down, but there was only the uninterrupted blue of a sunny afternoon sky.

The cat huffed quietly from behind her.

“Why did you do that?” It asked.

Violet shrugged faintly, still staring up through the broken roof.

“It rescued us.” She said.

“Rescued….” The cat rolled its eyes. “You could have dealt with the dog on your own.”

Violet looked back, surprised…but only for a moment. She didn’t feel even remotely like someone who could have bested the dog, but the cat was right. The hatchet was still in her hands. Back in the closet, she’d been ready to bring it down.

She’d been ready to kill.

The shock of the encounter was draining and all at once the world seemed to acquire a new sense of plasticky flatness, its subtleties insignificant next to the intensity that had just passed.

It had only been a few minutes since the dog had been dispatched, yet Violet couldn’t quite parse that. Time, once so linear and unfailingly dependable, had entirely abdicated the normal bounds of operation.

From beneath the surreality of this, the old terror endured. Violet recalled the full depths of it all too easily, her urge to survive at all costs. Traces of blood still hung at the edge of the air, warm and metallic. Through them came total certainty.

“I would have done it.” She murmured wonderingly, then let the hatchet’s weight drag it from her fingers. The instrument clattered dully against peeling linoleum, its blade chipping a dark hole into the material.

A tremble worked its way up from somewhere deep inside of her, and for a moment Violet tried to tell herself that there was no reason for it. The dog was gone. She was safe. Yet this reasoning was wrong, and she knew it even as her mind reeled. Casting aside all emotionality, it was true that the immediate danger had passed, but that did nothing to dispel the fear she felt.

This, a part of her knew, was not entirely directed at what had happened with the dog, but rather her own reaction to it. All at once Violet recalled what the cat had said to her the previous day about the old instincts that endured, deeply buried yet altogether present and ready.

In the time before she had met the cat it had never occurred to Violet that there might be anything more to herself than what she was already aware of. She thought bright thoughts and knew the form that they would take because, so she assumed, this was all under her own control.

Since leaving the village, however, great dark spots had opened up across all sorts of subjects, blotting out things that she had once assumed were unassailable fonts of knowledge on how the world worked. It reminded her a bit of how the cat had shattered her assumptions about the forest…though this time there was no new knowledge rushing in to replace what had been lost.

She had a sudden sense that what she felt and thought and knew about herself represented only a thin, gilt layer atop the greater depths of her mind. Beyond that she could sense the broadest edges of everything else, but none of it rushed to make itself known. A million years of instinct and arcane urge remained where it had always been, shifting beneath the skin of all things.

Violet’s first instinct was to draw back, as she so often did when faced with the unknown, yet even to consider that produced a paradox. How could she retreat when the thing she was retreating from was also herself?

The cat moved up alongside her, stepping delicately over the handle of the fallen hatchet.

“Yes,” it said. “Of course you would have done it. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“I feel sick.” Violet said, and felt strangely disappointed that her nausea wasn’t stronger. It roiled weakly at the bottom of her throat, listless and disappointing. Had she been sick then at least that would have been something, but instead she leaned miserably against the wall and covered her eyes with one hand. Cracks of daylight came in from between her fingers, printing lines of red across the insides of her eyelids.

“This is part of being alive,” the cat said after a moment. “You will grow, and with that growth will come change.”

“I don’t want to change.” Violet mumbled.

“Too bad. You’ve changed since this conversation began. Your hair has grown, your blood has circulated, and you are ever so slightly not the person you were even a moment ago. You can pretend that you’re forcing the world to pause, but that won’t do anything other than make it easier for you to lie to yourself.”

“Then what? What do I do?” Violet asked, failing to keep a helpless tremble from infiltrating her voice.

“What were you doing before?” The cat asked back.

Before? Before what? Did the cat intend for its question to be literal: what she’d been doing just before they’d encountered the dog? Or was it more abstract in an infuriatingly cat sort of way?

Before fear? Before she’d felt different from everyone else?

Violet found her thoughts turning towards home. She hadn’t been afraid then, for she’d had the ash-pit and her mother and the cozy familiarity of her bedroom. She’d had the routine of the day and her dresses, the fence along the edge of the back garden and….

It was no use lying. She’d been afraid there too. And she’d been different. And, whether she wanted to admit it or not, there had been something in the center of her that reached outward towards the cat’s appearance and did not recoil when it spoke.

To envision her home now felt like trying to grasp the form of a ghost, for all of the old familiarities seemed no more substantial than mist in the embrace of a rising sun.

“I don’t know,” Violet said at last, shoulders slumping. “I don’t know anything anymore.”

The cat had nothing to say to this and Violet left the hospital in silence.

It took some time for her eyes to fully adjust, and when they did she found the streets silent around her but for the hum of bees. Again the faintest trace of their interconnectivity shivered at the edge of her mind, and again Violet recoiled from it. She didn’t want to experience anything out of the ordinary for a long, long time.

That being said, what even was ordinary anymore? Her own perceptions played a huge role in determining that, and if she couldn’t control the conclusions they landed on, then what was the point of adhering to them?

All of those questions, each more unanswerable than the last. The cat appeared across the street from her and Violet caught a hint of the nothingness that it had slipped out of. Even that brief glimpse made her eyes feel numb and she looked away.

The cat gave her a long, probing look.

“You can’t control the weather either.” It said.

“What?”

“Or how thickly the nettles grow in your path,” the cat continued, as though she hadn’t spoken. “The world is full of unknowns, yet you forge ahead regardless, do you not?”

Violet turned her gaze to the ground. She knew what the cat was getting at, the conclusion it was herding her relentlessly towards, but a stubborn part of her refused to go along.

“I don’t like any of them.” She muttered.

“Of course not, but you don’t have to like something in order to accept it. I don’t know how the weather works, not entirely, but I still realize that rain will sometimes come.”

“This isn’t rain or clouds or nettles,” Violet protested. “I’m in a forest surrounded by demons and monsters, and I don’t want to be. I want to find the Glow so that I can get rid of it all.”

“And have everything go back to normal?” The cat asked.

Violet knew her companion had to be asking a leading question of some sort, but she didn’t care.

“Yes.” She said.

“And what does normal mean? Not too long ago you might have included me in that list of bad things, and the forest in general. Do you know what you’re doing, Violet?”

“I know what the bad things are, and I know that the Glow can help,” Violet said stubbornly, refusing to engage with the main thrust of the cat’s argument. “That’s enough.”

“If you say so.” The cat said quietly, then turned and slipped away.